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November 30, 2000 Russian environmental referendum bid failsMOSCOW - Russian officials yesterday rejected a referendum bid for a nationwide poll on the formation of an independent environment protection agency. Russian environmental groups, spearheaded by the local arm of Greenpeace, last month said they had gathered more than two million signatures to back a request for a referendum on the issue, as required by the law. The referendum bid was a response to the government's decision to merge its forestry, ecological and mining agencies. But the Central Election Commission refused the petition, saying many of the signatures were not authentic. "Out of 2,490,000 signatures collected in support of the referendum only 1,873,000 were recognised as authentic, falling short of the required minimum of two million for a referendum to be called," a spokesman for the commission said by telephone. The ecologists said the move was meant eventually to force a reversal of President Vladimir Putin's decision to scrap the State Ecology Committee and the Federal Forestry Service as separate government bodies and merge them. In a message posted on Russia's Greenpeace internet site (www.greenpeace.ru), the group said it would fight the commission's decision and promised to rally the hundreds of thousands of people whose signatures had been rejected.
Russian ecologists have said the merger decision would effectively
eliminate independent control over the environment in Russia, which has
seen widespread abuse.
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